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People say I’m a fool, and I’m selfish, and I’m conceited, and I’m kidding the public, and currying sympathy, and crying poor on the outside while cackling on the inside.

I found out just the other day that people say I’m in the fiction business, when it comes to the facts of my own life.

Quite by coincidence, three good friends on three separate occasions told me that the public perception of my financial downfall more than five years ago was nothing like what I perceived it to be. I always believed that most people sympathized, at least a little, and hoped for the best for me. This turns out not to be true.

Those who explained this to me, by the way, are not the kind of friends who can’t wait to tell you that you’ve put on weight. They’re good friends, genuine and caring, who’ve given their personal and professional support to me for many years.

One of them said he was stunned by people’s comments. He called them “heartless.” When he defended me, detractors called him a pushover. Another friend told me bluntly that I should have known how skeptical people were about my tale of woe. She said that I was “tone deaf.”

People say, it turns out, that I didn’t have a great deal of money stolen – or if I did, it was because I was greedy and I asked for it.

People say it wasn’t really everything we had.

People (a few people, among them the IRS agent we’ve dealt with over our hideous tax woes) that I couldn’t have become so well known and so successful and not have money hidden somewhere, in numbered bank accounts, in other countries – in my wooden shoes, I guess.

People said, “Pride goeth before a fall.”

People said, “Greed is its own reward.”

People said, “The bigger they are, the harder they fall.”

People said, “Easy come, easy go.”

People said, “Everyone gets a comeuppance.”

People said, “She was like one of those lottery winners who throws it all away.”

People said, “There’s more to it than she’s saying.”

People said, “If she posts pictures on Facebook of her frolicking in Ireland, she’s not doing that bad.”

People said, “If she’s having such a tough time, why does she have all those kids?”

People said, “She has to have recovered by now. She should get over it.”

I never knew.

I never suspected.

I had no idea at all that anyone doubted my word.

I never knew people thought I was prideful.

I especially never knew that anyone thought that the way I made my money was easy.

You’re not supposed to let other people define you. You’re supposed to really believe that what people about you usually has everything to do with them, and may not necessarily have much to do with you. I would tell my children, no one has permission to make you feel small. But it’s harder to take your own advice. For someone who depends on goodwill for her living – that is, the good intentions of people who read – perception is reality. So hearing these things brought me to my knees. None of them is true. Most of them are grossly unfair. Still, it was stunning to think that I wandered around in a bubble, thinking the people I met were on my side.

I do understand that my calamities seem extreme. As the third friend explained, it verges on impossible that a money theft and a property tax problem and then a rogue, hateful IRS encounter could all happen to the same person. It seems impossible that they could all happen to someone who’d already gone through being a young widow and raising kids on her own. It’s too much bad luck.

I get that.

When you write stories suggested by real life, you have to tone it down, because real life beggars the imagination. Real life sometimes really is too much. Real life sometimes does defy the credibility budget for a story, which is why I tell my students sometimes that the worst way to justify a story is by saying that it happened that way in real life. Further, much worse things have happened to people than losing all their money. I’m grateful every day that what I lost was not my children’s health, or my health.

However, anyone who says, well, it’s only money … has some, at least a little bit. It’s not only money. It’s safety. It’s security. It’s a little bit of a windbreak in a gale of a world.

For a long time, I didn’t even have a little bit.

For a long time, I had considerably less than nothing.

For a long time, I had hideous credit debt because I made the foolish decision to try to keep the older kids in college by paying part of their school bills with credit cards, until they could scramble for student loans. I couldn’t bear that they would have to drop out because of my mishap.

Many people I’d helped out couldn’t help me. Others wouldn’t. Several, and I bless them, did. It turns out (because I asked) that even my own brother didn’t realize how much I’d lost, or how bad off I was. Neither did any of my in laws. I didn’t spell it out. I should have.

Even my brother assumed it was all better now.

It’s not.

Debt is a luge that gathers speed and danger as it hurtles downhill. I am only now, or at least soon, trying to stop the desperate descent. Then I’ll make my way up the hill.

For the record, when all those kids (except for the last two, my daughters born in Ethiopia) were born to me or came to our family through adoption, we had enough to support them well.

The adoption of our daughters was nearly completed when all our money was taken, and no further fees were required. Good sense would have demanded that we stop out. But good behavior demanded that we proceed, since we had given our word and to renege would have left a stain on my character – no matter how justified it would have been.

For the record, for all those years that we sank deeper into more serious need, my husband did not work. I still don’t know completely why he did not work. He was healthy and capable, and he can’t fully explain it to me. For the record, the investment decision was his. Why didn’t I stop him? I didn’t know any better. This wasn’t Bernie Madoff, making outrageous claims to his clients. It was another guy, another crook, not a household name. If you go to the dentist, do you assume the diploma on the wall is real? Or do you investigate it?

My husband made the choice. I went along with it. He was foolish, and I didn’t know any better.

Most marriages would have broken up.

Perhaps this one should have.

Our children, however, had endured a terrific blow, required to give up their home, their school, their friends, their lives, literally to pile into the car and drive off, the night before Thanksgiving. I didn’t want them to lose their dad as well. Their dad loves them very much, and they love him. My anger would have been revenged – for a month, for a year. Then I’d have added one more bizarre statistic to my resume as a person: I’d be the mother of nine kids who got divorced.

But a wise pal of mine who’s a counselor says that you don’t get divorced when you want to, you get divorced when you have to. My husband isn’t evil, or even bad, or even mean to me. He trusts too many people. He still thinks most people are good.

I don’t know if it’s too late to heal all the wounds between us. I try, but sometimes not as hard as I could.

Some days I don’t know anything.

I do know that I am on the level, and that my life won’t ever be the same.

For the record, anytime you see me on Facebook frolicking in exotic or even pleasant places, I’ve been paid to go there, to lecture or to teach. Whoever hired me has helped pay the way for one of my younger kids to come along. Otherwise, it would be difficult for me to afford to take them anywhere, even to visit relatives in the Midwest, even to go camping. A well-heeled friend helped buy their plane tickets when I got to teach at Disney World. Should I have made it clear that I wasn’t there under my own auspices? People don’t like to hear about a long, unrolling mess. Even tragedy can be boring. So I try to put on a happy face, and sometimes it even works.

For the record, it was never easy come, easy go.

I made my living the old-fashioned way. I earned it. And seeing it all gone was about as easy as having bowel surgery in the woods with a stick.

I was never prideful.

I was never greedy.

I was the same person when I had money as I was before I had any money and as I am now. I guess this is a rant, but I have to admit I feel I have a right to a rant. I’m not the best person in the world but I’m a decent sort. I try to be good. I try to be happy, and one thing I know is true: I would never, not ever, not ever, ever kick anyone who was down. If you thought those things about me, and especially if you said them, maybe it made you feel better about your own life.

A few things have happened to me twice in a lifetime (being a bride, being a newborn mother, being financially okay one night and penniless the next moring).

This one, I have to say, is unique.

The tape is taped. My teen daughters and I went to Los Angeles last June and had a ball horsing around in the fancy hotel and the studio.

I looked good in purple. Oprah Winfrey changed from her yellow sweater to a wine color so that we wouldn’t clash. My makeup was done by someone not just with skill, but with powers that verged on sorcery. I wanted to have my face decoupaged, so all I’d have to do each day would be to use the spray attachment in the kitchen sink to hose it off.

Granted, “being on Oprah with my book” is not the way that “being on Oprah with my book” used to be. The first time this happened to me (which also was the first time it happened to anybody) was a golden ticket. If your book was featured on the The Oprah Winfrey Show on NBC, particularly if it was in the form of one of the book club books (and my first novel, The Deep End of the Ocean, started all that) your book would become a major bestseller.

Oprah may indeed still have the clout that can bring the beef industry to its knees (remember the hamburgers?). But her book club’s heyday is over, and nothing and no one has that kind of clout anymore. It’s a diffuse world. The equivalent of what it once meant to be on NBC is now going viral on youtube and then writing a book about how you did that … and even that isn’t a guarantee. The world is diffuse, and everyone today really is famous for fifteen minutes, but only fifteen minutes – really maybe only eight minutes.

I was of two minds about telling my riches-to-rags-and-my-new-book story on a show called Where Are They Now on the OWN cable network (the show will be broadcast on OWN March 19).

I wasn’t sure about the question, where is she now? Presumably, that’s like the how much does it cost question. If you have to ask … you don’t want to know, or you really do want to know, for not very good reasons.

My mother-in-law thought I would be perceived as the literary equivalent of David Cassidy. She scared me into thinking that people would believe I’d done something seamy, like get hooked on cocaine, as if I could ever afford that, or gotten religion, as if I could afford that.

But as it turned out, Ms. Winfrey wanted to do stories about people who’d made a big splash on her show, for good or ill, and mine was good. When The Deep End of the Ocean was the first book in the storied (as it were) Oprah Winfrey Book Club, that was a really good day that led to a really good decade. However, the half of a decade that followed, when all my money was stolen by a miscreant investment advisor my husband somehow trusted, was … not so hot.

At the end of that time, however, I finished a book called Two if By Sea that is just the best thing I’ve written in a long, long, long time. I want everybody who likes to read big adventures that break your heart to read this book, and I’m not ashamed to say so. So I had to ignore my mother-in-law’s advice, as I have, I must confess, on a couple of other occasions, such as when she told me not to ask my husband direct questions but instead to just observe him closely to try to interpret what he was thinking. I tried it once, but he said, “Why are you staring at me like that?”

As for Oprah and me, it’s the right time. It’s also probably the last time, for Oprah and me. Shortly after this taping, she stopped personally doing the interviews for the Where Are They Now? show. She’s a good interviewer, and, although I talked about some painful things, I also had fun. I knew that, in some way, she wished me well. I knew she wished my book well. And I do, too.

I know that people blog from blog sites and from group sites and from social media sites.

I love all of those things, but I love my website best.

Ten years ago, when my website first went “up,” only a handful of authors had websites where readers could visit, and see photos, and order books (but not, regrettably, get coffee). I consider all the ones who filled indebted to my leadership. Something about having a home on the web appeals to me. This is my real estate, and dedicated to my stories and thoughts, a clubhouse for me and my readers (and again, why is there no button for espresso?) Please write to me here, and suggest things that I can “blog” about, and what kind of news you want. Very soon, you’ll see the schedule for my upcoming book tour dates for Two if By Sea, and, if I’m coming to a city near you for an event, please come out and say hello. Writing is all about the reader, and, if it gets lonely between books, it’s only when I can’t picture your face or hear your voice, written or spoken.

It’s been ten years, and every storefront needs a remodeling now and then, and this website just had a serious update.

I’ll drive across town to go to the post office where the person behind the counter, who’s younger than I am by ten years, says, “Hey kiddo.”

I’ve always thought that I could cash in bigtime on a 900-number. Forget about phone sex. This would be phone sympathy, with a side of sweet nothings. The callers would be answered by an African-American woman of indeterminate years and girth – who sounds maternal and substantial. “He said that to you? Are you kidding me? Awww, honey.”

In fact, the number would be 1900AWHONEY. Take my card number, and let the minutes roll.

It’s a cold world, and while I don’t want the equivalent of phony-celeb xxoo’s, and I don’t want creepy presumed intimacy, any spoonful of sympathy is like homemade preserves on my heart. Increasingly, to even the human voices I interact with, I’m a number – actually, I’m the last four digits of my Social Security number. This is for my protection. This is for my ease. But it’s not for my pleasure. For that, I want people to know my name and behave as if they’ve just been waiting for me to call.

It’s absolutely not the kind of sweetness that comes from long and genuine acquaintance. But no moment of human kindness goes unnoticed … heed this, order takers, veterinary assistants, and presidential candidates. A little bit of personal means a whole lot of power.

That above quote is from an 1847 letter written by one of the young women who survived the terrible ordeal of what is now called “the Donner party,” not to be confused with the dinner party …

You should always beware anyone who knows a short cut. But the nice young author was from Tucson. The lovely folks who’d driven us had lost their car keys. It was late, past ten, but a nice night, and Christina Baker Kline (a pal and the #1 New York Times bestselling author of ‘The Orphan Train,’), a very supple woman, said, “Come on!” She was undaunted by her high heels. We decided to take the short cut.

More than an hour later, Christina was daunted, thirsty, annoyed, and ready to call the taxi App Uber – although Mr. Shortcut, kept on trucking in his Merrells. I was barefoot, on a dark urban street, trying to avoid broken glass, embraced by shame that the shoes I had to remove were just flats, although very cruel flats.

“I know the hotel is right around here,” said Merrell man.

“As in … Arizona?” muttered another of the writers.

Finally, we got there. I surveyed my blisters, the size and shape of Thin Mints. I called my son, Rob. Heat a small knife, he said, cut them open, then stuff them with Neosporin and layer on big Band Aids. All I had was a coffee swizzle stick and a safety pin. I ran the safety pin through the coffee machine until it was … warm.

Lancing blisters is fun in a grisly way.

After that forced march, I deserved a little fun.

Then I fell into bed, both soles pulsing.

When I woke up, I nearly threw up, those blisters shouting with pain and twice as big.

My friend Victoria, the creator of the reading event Women’s Voices, called to caution me to be on time. Considering canceling, I said, frostily, “I am never late.” I tried not to think of whatever else had happened on the carpet of that hotel hall as I toe-walked to beg for Band-Aids. Plastering them on, I failed to notice the open water bottle on the bed next to me. I was already fully dressed in my only outfit when suddenly, I was sitting in a pool of cool.

Don’t picture me standing on my toes using a curling iron on my hair with one hand and a blow dryer not on my hair with the other hand.

I admitted I couldn’t walk.

If I had been a Civil War solider, my commander would have shot me. I wouldn’t have cared.

As it was, I tried to avoid the gaze of those who made way for the golf cart. I knew they were thinking the thing you think when you see a group of fat, perfectly healthy people being ferried through O’Hare on a trolley. They were thinking, big old lazy sissy loser.

I expect to waste money on things that kind of work or look like they will work or work for a while because, whether because of design, craftsmanship, or my own inability to make them work, things usually don’t, at least for me.

This isn’t a how-things-are-now versus how-things-were-then thing. Planned obsolescence of electronics, for example, is to be expected: they cost so much less than they did originally that we sort of deserve to have them wear out after a while. When you think that a $1.99 “calculator” can do more than Univac, one of the proto “computers” that was the size of a room – and that the modern iteration fits on a keychain, you have to give “now” some credit.

And there are a few things and processes that, in my recent life, have astounded me by doing what they’re supposed to do. Let me tell you about a couple of them:

Boottights. That’s a hard name to say, but these things are just crazy good. The brainchild of Shelby Mason, a gusty entrepreneur, these are tights with all kinds of cool patterns and colors that end in a little foot sock, the kind you wear to exercise. Your feet don’t either sweat or get cold; your boot lining stays nice, and you look really, really good. They cost about $12 and are worth twice that.

Parchment paper for baking. Your cookies and bread really do come out nicer and they really don’t stick to the pan. You don’t have to wash the pan. I’d like parchment paper coverings for my kids.

Etsy. I’m shocked when people don’t know what etsy is. Etsy is my life. It’s a website on which you can shop directly with artisans, buying everything from clothing to furniture to jewelry to art to soap to honey. I just got so excited talking about etsy I went to etsy and bought something. I bought honey (I’m obsessed with honey, the good kind, and it should be on this list because in my house, we go through honey the way other people go through dish soap). Some of the best things I’ve purchased on etsy include a charm bracelet celebrating the book ‘Anna Karenina,’ with charms including a red purse and a train (I know) made by this guy Sam who has a store in London called Hoolala. I also bought a ring from Sam that, when people get close enough to see it, says ‘Be careful what you wish for.’ I love the way some people laugh and others kind of back away. The BEST thing I ever bought on etsy was from DesignsbyAnnette (you have to run the words together), and it’s earrings made of the image of books printed on thick cardboard. Each earring has the image of a vintage typewriter key attached, and sometimes, the keys are the author’s intials. And there’s a QUOTE from the book on the back of every cover! OMG! Readers to whom I give this gift worship me, and it cost me $19! Annette can make earrings from any book! I hate to tell you about this because now I can’t give you the earrings as a present. Most years, I buy virtually all my Christmas presents on www.etsy.com.

Positive Reinforcement Training for Dogs. My brother yells at his dogs .. and they do anything they want. I praise my dog to the stars and even give him a crumb of cheese for coming when I call him, and Dante would come when I called him if he were chasing a T-bone steak down the street.

I’m going to write more about things that actually do what they’re suppose to later … if you want to share some of yours with me, write me via my website, www.jackiemitchard.com.

One of the reasons (a small reason, but important, to be sure) that I hate being away from home for more than a few days is that I know that I’ll come home to find a can of Spider Kill displaying pride of place of the hall shelf — the purchase of my mother-in-law, who hates spiders with the same vigor that I respect them. She shares this fear with my eldest daughter, who won’t open the windows of her room, even in hot weather, for fear that a spider might get in through the screen.

They say that phobias are the manifestation of opposites. A humble person actually, perhaps unconsciously, is so conceited that he wants people to start a religion about him. People who fear spiders actually want to be them or eat them … or something.

I don’t believe this for a moment, at least spider-wise.

To love spiders, you have to be grateful to them. As Annie Dilliard wrote in her masterpiece, ‘A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,’ “I allow spiders to run the house. I figure that any predator that hopes to make a living on whatever smaller creatures might blunder into a four-inch-square surface bit of space in the corner of the bathroom where the tub meets the floor needs every bit of my support. They catch flies and even field crickets in those webs.” While she allows that fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly, and insects seem to have to do one horrible thing right after another, she exempts spiders.

And while I will get in my bed and scream for help if a big moth blunders harmlessly into my room, I will fend off anyone who tries to hurt one of my spiders.

It isn’t just because of the gallantry of Charlotte A. Cavatica in E.B. White’s splendid tale for children and other intelligent creatures. At my wedding, one of my sons read, “It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.” It’s because when I look at those webs, which are almost proof of intelligent design (or at least the intelligent design of spiders) the bloodless corpses of things that are so much worse and more disgusting are displayed there like trophies on the walls of some 1040s big-game hunter.

Water bugs. Done for.

Moths. No more than husks.

Silverfish. A whole shore lunch of them.

Mosquitoes. Oh, be still my heart! Any enemy of a mosquito is an amiga of mine.

In ancient mythology, spiders (perhaps because making webs is painstaking work) were symbols of patience and even wisdom. They don’t bumble about but make their trap strong as steel (did you know that a spider’s web is, in fact, stronger than steel, although you might not want to drive your car over a span made of that silk) and then they wait. I imagine them thinking about delights to come. They look almost sleepy, until the fly gets moored on the sticky stuff, and then, they move like the eight-legged little cheetahs they are.

When I’m away, and my daughter’s mad at me, she calls me and says, “I just killed your spiders.” As messages go, this is better than, “I just finished smoking crack,” but it still wounds me. She knows the effect it has. But karma has its uses. May all those slain arachnids visit her in her dreams, reminding her that it’s not nice to fool with the order of things.

“Mom, you have to sign this and give me a check for thirty-five dollars. Or twenty-five dollars. I’m not sure.”

“Mom, sign this. It means I’m staying after every other Tuesday from three to four in the afternoon. So I’ll come home on the bus but then you have to drive me back right after because I’m not in Stay and Play.”

“Mom, can you volunteer to help my English class write a novel? Twenty of us are going to write one chapter at a time.”

“Mom, sign my spelling test.”

Sign my take-home folder. My permission slip. My picture-day makeup. Sign my math practice. Sign the slip for my recorder and put five dollars in this envelope. No, I can’t use Will’s because he said he spit on it and had cold sores.

Sign this twelve-page document explaining the reason I was assigned to the orange reading group instead of the green reading group.

Sign the permission for me to audition for ‘Annie.”

Sign the permission slip for me to try to get into the orange reading group.

All this leaves out the visitations, which began the first week with Open House – for which the children draw maps, write letters and make puzzles intended to cause wretchedness for those parents who are still at work at 5 p.m. when the tour of the school begins – and continues through Back to School Night, Progress Night, The Octoberfest, The Holiday Holller, The Spring Fling and The End of Days.

Now, I know that my parents knew where my school was, and knew my teachers in a general way. This was not because they ever showed up for any Open Houses that didn’t involve liquor or barbecue. It was because I got very good grades and also got in trouble a lot. I got the good grades because I liked to read, and I got in trouble because I had (and still have) a mouth disproportionately big compared to my size and … it must be said, intelligence. I remember once my mother having to come to school because I refused to write the fifth-grade skit about the immortal love of John Smith and Pocahontas because my sources had proved conclusively that they were BFF’s (although she might have been better off with him than John Rolfe). The 60s offered a more civilized approach to school: my parents did their job and I did, or didn’t do mine. My own school bag was like the vacuum cleaner bag of someone who owns five golden retrievers, swollen with papers I dutifully put in but never took out.

I know what today’s teachers are trying to accomplish. They want to make sure that uber-busy parents stay connected to school, and take responsibility for their children’s education. I hope this has worked for me, although when I was quizzing my eldest daughter on SAT words and learned her definition of “probity,” I had my doubts.

I don’t know about where you live, but for me, there hasn’t been this much signage in Massachusetts since the Constitution.

It wasn’t a big deal, my daughter missing her doctor’s appointment. Not life or death. But she missed it because of all the roadblocks for an annual walk to raise money to fight a dread disease. And we simply couldn’t get close enough to the office fast enough.

Actually, it was a big deal.

We scheduled her appointment months earlier, failing to check into the schedule of walks, runs, and rides that would pass through our very small town. We still had to pay, and reschedule, months in the future.

Just the other day, the driver of a balloon-festooned follow car yelled at me, “Be safe! You’re too close to the runners!” I was driving kids to school. To be farther away, I’d have had to cross into the other lane of traffic.

That was just what happened not far from here, when a bike race for another cure caused a car accident. No one was badly hurt, but one car was totaled, another’s front end smashed, and a biker’s arm broken. The racer is suing.

Now, no one denies the glorious impulse to band together for the common good. Much of the time, if you scratch any of the bike riders decked out like the Italian Olympic team – who’s making me mad by throwing empty water bottles on my lawn — you’ll find someone who cares. Those walkers may have a daughter, a sister, a wife who battles MS or beat breast cancer.

I’m no road hog who thinks motor vehicles own the street. But as these well-meant events get bigger and bigger and more frequent (last weekend there were three in a five-mile radius) they interfere, often rudely, sometimes dangerously, with the very life they’re fighting for.

And I also know that not all those ferocious competitors are in it for the cure.

Some want a good excuse to practice the X-treme sport they love, and for which they’ve bought thousands of dollars worth of equipment. For some people, who aren’t jocks, it’s a reunion with old friends.

Nothing wrong with any of that. The money raised really helps. But organizing those events costs a ton of money too.

It would help just as surely if you gave directly to Women Against MS, with a flick of your finger to their website. It would really help if you volunteered to drive a wheelchair-bound MS patient to clinic appointments.

You don’t get people standing along the road cheering for you for that. You don’t get the tee shirt.

But it is, in its quietness, an even truer way to help.

It also doesn’t wreak as much havoc as these huge and endless walks and rides do – in small towns like mine, and in big cities. The most recent wasn’t even in support of a cause: it was commemorating the role of a famous teacher in history.

When the circus moves on, the elephant dung remains.

And that’s true of the 5K for Whatever, too. The roads are littered with Solo cups and empty water bottles; the rain shreds the posters. The organizers are supposed to tidy up; but they don’t. They’ve done their good.

Do I sound like a curmudgeon? I don’t think I am. My best friend has MS, and I’ve gone to 47 states to fund-raise for that fight. I walk the walk, even if I don’t walk the Walk with a capital ‘W.” I actually believe more people ought to try another way, one that brings them up close with whatever they’re trying to erase – from Alzheimer’s to animal cruelty.

So, walk thirty miles with a group of pals. Do it every year.

Race across three-states on a bike race. Fight to win.

But as the old commercials say, just do it. And if you have to do it on the street where I live, don’t yell at me if I go on living my ordinary life there, too. Not everybody races for a cure.

Here it is, summer ended and everyone back in school – the nights no longer “good for sleeping” but edging toward cold. The old timers (and the young timers) say that this summer rushed past. I know that it did for me. It took me a full six weeks to recover from the emotional toll of two daughters graduating eighth grade.

It was joyous. It was lovely. It was, more than either of these, harrowing. Read on.

By my count, including kindergarten, I’ve graduated five times. Of course, that was what my children call “back in the day,” before iPhones, $200 ballet flats, and instant status updates – which is to say, pre-culture.

Still, I know about commencement. Three of my nine children have actual college diplomas, and they received them only yesterday, it seems. There were rituals, observances, fountain pens given and then re-gifted.

Despite this, nothing could have prepared me for the onslaught associated with the graduation of my two eighth grade daughters.

Said Thoreau, beware occasions requiring new clothes. Beware especially five of them in six weeks.

OMG, as my daughters would say.

At first, my shy girls, Mia and Merit, weren’t sure about the “semi.” (Merit, born in Ethiopia, thought this dance might be held in an eighteen-wheeler.) We urged them to reconsider and go.

After all, we’d had an eighth grade dance. It was in the gym – in a gym similar to the place where, four years later, we would go to the prom. We bought dresses. We bought them at Sears.

How could we know that, once unleashed, our girls’ desires would make Anna Wintour look like the poster girl for voluntary simplicity?

They thought we might have to go to New York for a weekend to shop.

They discussed how to measure up to Simone, Stephanotis, and especially Serena, whose dress was created for this purpose when she was eight or something by a designer in Istanbul using age progressions.

Then came the class trip. Not a day trip to the amusement park. A week trip to D.C. No more than $150 each in spending money!

Next, an LBD.

For the dinner dance.

What’s up with dinner dance? A dinner dance is what your parents went to in 1969 at the Moose Lodge.

The EIGHTH GRADE dinner dance is being held at a place called the Jailhouse Tavern. I’m not making that up.

This leaves only the yacht cruise.

Now, our family is so large that when we moved to this small town, it basically changed the census data. We have a certain need. So the school was gallant in helping make sure that our daughters were included in all these adventures.

Of course, as with all school fundraisers, no one except the parents buys anything. Co-workers now avert their eyes when they see us coming, even if we pretend the sign-up sheet is just a petition to ban books or something.

Now, there are the tributes. Serena’s parents are buying ads in the local papers and hiring a videographer. Stephanotis has an uncle who designed fireworks for their family celebration. There’s a question of dresses for the private parties? Is re-wear okay?

And yet, since January it’s been a check check here and a check check there. Here a check, there a check, everywhere a check check.

What am I going to do for high school graduation? Sell my plasma starting in tenth grade? Will Serena’s parents host a destination party in Tuscany?

Does anyone else think this is a little excessive for the culmination of only the first eight years of school?

Isn’t this consumer culture pushed to its extreme, ordinary life as an MTV reality show, the unsurprising adultification of adolescents, the trickle down of red carpet desires into a blue-collar world, the crass reification of life altogether?